Jeff Biggers - Resistance: Reclaiming an American Tradition

ALSO BY JEFF BIGGERS

The Trials of a Scold

Damnatio Memoriae

State Out of the Union

Reckoning at Eagle Creek

The United States of Appalachia

In the Sierra Madre

No Lonesome Road

Resistance

Copyright 2018 by Jeff Biggers

First hardcover edition: 2018

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

Grateful acknowledgment for reprinting materials is made to the following:

Amrita: Immortal 2016 by Kara Hoving

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Biggers, Jeff, 1963 author.

Title: Resistance : reclaiming an American tradition / Jeff Biggers.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017057937 | ISBN 9781640090477 | eISBN 9781640090484

Subjects: LCSH: Passive resistanceUnited States. | MulticulturalismUnited States. | Social movementsUnited States. | Social justiceUnited States.

Classification: LCC HM1281 .B545 2018 | DDC 303.48/40973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017057937

Jacket designed by Jason Gabbert

Book designed by Jordan Koluch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Per Carla, per sempre

For my billie boys, Massimo and Diego, and their future

For my folks, Mam and Paps, makers of our radical roots

In memory of

Ella Baker

and

William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

Thats starting to be history now.

Right now were in a whirlpool of paradigms

Beatitudes and messes. With uprisings

come upwellings of old-fashioned ideas re-shined and green-stamped

ideas brewed for ages before popping out and hailed in headlines

Where did this come from?

And others swirl down into the depths

Forgotten stories of our foremothers

who thrust us up as collective memory dragged them down.

But we were not seeking recognition, we sought only change

And still we seek, forever galvanized

Bringing ourselves to the tables, turning power plays into

compromises reaching our hands out to the bottom where weve been instead of

clawing our way up to the top, building change, casting seeds, setting

small fires wherever we can make it, let them spread instead of

waiting for one giant fix to make or break it.

Sustaining the things that make life worth living instead of

worth money, living in ways that

make sense instead ofthat other stuff.

K ARA H OVING, A MRITA: I MMORTAL

C LIMATE N ARRATIVE P ROJECT

AUTHORS NOTE

If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.

Fannie Lou Hamer, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired, 1964

T HESE ARE THE TIMES THAT try our souls, as Thomas Paine would say.

On the day of President Donald Trumps landmark decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord in the summer of 2017, my twelve-year-old son Massimo asked me if there was any hope for action on climate change. His real question: Was there any hope for his future?

It took me a while to muster the words to answer my sons question. He had heard me rattle on for years about the realities of climate change, the possibilities of regenerative cities, and the unending struggle for civil rights. But these stories suddenly seemed distanteven illusoryagainst the rollbacks of Trumps policies on multiple fronts, not only climate action.

Instead of a lecture on climate change, I wanted to tell my son about a moment of doubt, sitting in a jail cell in Washington, DC, in 1985, after I had been arrested in a sit-in at the South African embassy. We had joined a year-long campaign of civil disobedience, as part of the Free South African Movement, to draw attention to the American support of the brutal apartheid system of white supremacy and segregation. As a twenty-one-year-old, I realized that African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela had spent more time in prison at Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor Verster Prison than I had been on the planet.

My cellmate was Rev. William Sloane Coffin, my boss at the Riverside Church in New York City, where I served as his personal aide. A World War II intelligence officer and former CIA agent, Coffin had led civil disobedience campaigns against the Vietnam War as the chaplain at Yale. But it was his role in one of the first Freedom Rides in the summer of 1961, following the courageous lead of young African American activists, that had transformed Coffins fervent belief in the role of nonviolent resistance.

Coffin smiled at the youthful frustration in my voice. I told him our protests seemed futile, even hopeless. The apartheid system seemed unshakeable. He looked at me with the same hesitation I offered my son. He told me what he had learned sitting in jail in Alabama.

Hope resists, he said, shifting on the concrete bench. Hopelessness adapts.

Calling it our duty rightly, Revolutionary forefather Thomas Paine had urged Americans, in one of the most hopeless moments before the American Revolution in 1776, to take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life. The seeds of our democracy, he reminded the disconsolate, would take root from an American resistance. Paine did not offer a promise but a challenge to the American colonies. The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth, he wrote in Common Sense .

Every generation must decide how that sun will illuminate the challenges of our own times. The language may alter, but the tribulation remains the same: The sun shines today also, Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded his generation of abolitionists in a dark moment of slavery in 1836; Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, Irish immigrant and labor leader Mary Mother Jones told a crowd of striking coal miners seeking fair wages and better working conditions in West Virginia in 1912.

In my own lifetime, Mississippi freedom leader Fannie Lou Hamer reminded civil rights activists in 1965 that the only way to end segregation in Mississippi was to bring out to the light all that has been under the cover all these years. Joining thousands of Mexican American students in the streets of Los Angeles on a spring day in 1968, Chicano leader Carlos Muoz, Jr., saw the historic walkouts at the nations largest public school system as a counterpart to the civil rights movementand a new chapter in an American tradition of resistance. In leading a successful two-year campaign of civil disobedience to halt fracking and the storing of liquid petroleum gas at Seneca Lake in New York, scientist Sandra Steingraber invoked the words in 2017 of poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox: To sin by silence, when we should protest / Makes cowards out of men.

More than a decade after she launched the Me Too movement to empower millions to speak out on sexual violence and harassment, activist Tarana Burke was recognized, among many other silence breakers, as the Time Person of the Year in 2017. At the historic March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC, on March 24, 2018, Emma Gonzlez read the names of fellow Florida students killed in the February 14 shooting, stood in silence, and then challenged the nation to fight for your lives before it is someone elses job.